I had a friend named Ralph who bought almost everything he needed from
a 99¢ Store. He would brag to me about the deals he'd get on instant
coffee, condensed milk, beer, cigarettes, and frozen pizza. "You get
a lot for your money at that place," he'd say, handing me a plate of
ersatz Oreos. "There are some real bargains there." But the only
times I'd consume instant coffee, condensed milk, beer, or frozen pizza
were when I was at Ralph's apartment, so I wasn't really able to tell if
the 99¢ products were as tasty and wholesome as the kind found in a
real supermarket.

There's a 99¢ Store in North Hollywood, about ten minutes' drive
from where I live. I've passed by many times on my way to or from the airport.
I've always been tempted to stop in for a look, but since I'm either in
a hurry to catch a plane or burned out from traveling, I kept putting off
a visit. Then one hot Saturday afternoon in July, I decided the time had
come. I got in my car and headed for The 99¢ Store.

On the way, I began wondering how these stores are able to survive. I
mean, they've been around for years, but they haven't yet become The $1.49
Store or The $1.99 Store. With inflation -- even the single-digit kind we've
had throughout the '90s -- profit margins must shrink every year. Maybe
the owners simply fill the shelves with cheaper junk. Ten years from now,
The 99¢ Store's inventory will be limited to bags of twist ties, wire
coat hangers, and little plastic cheese and cracker packages with cheese
so old that it's turned white.

Then again, maybe The 99¢ Stores are the dumping grounds for the
inevitable spillover of an economic system that must continuously grow larger,
producing more, consuming more, or else collapse into economic depression.
Perhaps, then, a well-stocked 99¢ Store is a leading indicator of a
healthy economy. Instead of "new housing starts" and "durable
goods" indices, maybe The Wall Street Journal should be running little
charts and graphs indicating the number of 99¢ Stores recently opened
across the country.

My train of thought was cut off, however, when I realized that I had
suddenly crossed an invisible border into a foreign territory. I started
to see people walking around with the "mullet" haircut, the kind
that's short and spiky on top and long in the back. This was a sure sign
of being in the North Valley. If you ever visit this area, don't expect
to find a florist, antique store, eyeglass boutique, or cafe like you would
only a few miles to the south. In the North Valley you'll do your shopping
at The Shower Door Doctor and Work Boot Warehouse. You'll relax at the Silver
Saddle Motel, which sports peeling paint flakes the size of potato chips
all over the walls and a weather-beaten, life-size replica of a horse on
the roof. Yes, this is 99¢ Store Country.

Before I reached my destination, however, several pretenders to the sub-dollar
shopping-market throne tried to lure me into their parking lots. One was
called 98¢ Plus, another was called 98¢ Up, and another was called
the 98¢ Minimarket. I was momentarily tempted to park my car and visit
them, since what could be better than a knock-off of a store that sells
knock-off products, but the urge quickly faded. I wanted no part of these
stores, for they broke the cardinal rule of sub-dollar shopping by offering
some products that cost more than a dollar. This, in my book, ruins everything.
How dare these establishments try to trick me into giving them business!
Any store can be a plus store. K-Mart, Target, and Walmart -- they're 98¢-Plus
stores; Hell, they're 25¢-Plus stores. Call me a purist, but I insist
on the real thing, The 99¢ Store, where I'm promised that absolutely
nothing has a price tag over ninety-nine cents. That's the place for me.

When I rolled into the parking lot of the promised land, I saw that the
sign on the building read "The 99¢ Only Store." That's telling
em! The store had a nice big parking lot, and thanks to the metal
posts installed around the door, it was impossible for customers to push
the shopping carts into the parking lot, thus eliminating the need to maneuver
around a bunch of carts stranded by customers eager to hurry home and use
or eat their new purchases.

Apparently, visiting The 99¢ Store on a Saturday afternoon is a
group activity for many families, because the place was teeming with children.
Most of the youngsters were hanging around the candy or toy sections, fighting
with their siblings, or running over to their mothers, waving something
they'd grabbed from the shelves, whining, "Mom, can we get this?"
The store isn't very big, nothing like a Safeway or Target. It's more like
the size of a B. Daltons. But it is crammed to the gills with merchandise.
The aisles are narrow, and I often found myself waiting for a crowd of shoppers
to disperse before I could push my shopping cart somewhere. Plus, there
are boxes of inventory stacked on the floor, blocking the aisles and making
it even more difficult to get around. Mounted on the ceiling are many rows
of naked fluorescent bulbs. The bright lights and the absence of Muzak in
the background gives the place a stark and panicked atmosphere. You might
even falsely believe that the customers weren't there to buy a shopping
experience, judging from the way they were grabbing things off the shelves
as fast as they could, loading up their carts with products, and getting
the hell out, dragging their crying kids by their wrists. But a cursory
examination of the store's offerings convinced me that the joy of shopping
is what this place is all about.

The simple way to describe the inventory of The 99¢ Store, of course,
is to say that it consists of products that cost less than a buck. To describe
the material used in the manufacture of the products sold there is only
slightly more complicated. I came up with a general rule: if you can't eat
it or drink it or rub it on your body, then it's probably made of plastic.
If not plastic, then cheap stamped metal, the kind of metal that's really
shiny, but the shiny part is just a layer that will quickly peel off, exposing
a dull gray metal that is probably poisonous. The only thing I remember
being made out of wood was a rat trap.

I was hoping to find some really odd toys, the kind with instructions
written by Asian people with a poor grasp of the English language, but I
was disappointed with the offerings in the store's toy section. It doesn't
compare to the toy section of the Dollar Store I went into when I visited
my parents in Colorado a couple of years. There I bought a Chinese toy in
a plastic bag with a label that said the toy was a "fulchau."
What was it? A tube-shaped plastic whistle, with a long spring coming out
of it. At the end of the spring, there's a Barbie Doll-lookalike head. And
inside the head of the doll, there's a lightbulb. A battery fits inside
the whistle. The only thing I can guess about this toy is that people in
China blow the whistle part and light the head and swing it around at parades
or celebrations. I bought three of them.

But I had no such luck at The 99¢ Store Toy department. There were
a couple of fake Barbie Dolls; an "Ashley," with an unusually
broad forehead and Jackie Kennedy far-apart eyes, and a "Rebecca,"
sort of a younger, chubbier Barbie. But they weren't worth buying. I did
buy a couple of plastic drinking cups shaped like rocket ships, at 2 for
99¢.

Next, I worked my way over to the personal care products department.
It was much more interesting. This is where I discovered that there are
five categories of brands at The 99¢ Store:

1. Soundalikes Large companies spend a lot of money to make their brand
names household words. Many 3rd-rate companies parasitically absorb the
strong reputation of established brands names by using similar sounding
names. I found "W-Tips" ear swabs ("W" for the wax they'll
help you extract?), "Roaster's Choice" instant coffee, and a spray
can of "Possession" cologne. Possession ("Our version of
Obsession" states the label) is made by a company called Elite Parfums
Paris, but upon reading the fine print I learned that the contents were
made in the USA, while the can was made in Finland. (Maybe since Paris is
sort of in between the two countries they picked it as the company's "average"
location.)

2. Lookalikes The look-and-feel copycat packaging at The 99¢ Store
is quite effective at subconsciously fooling you into believing you're getting
established brand name products. If I were illiterate I'd probably really
believe that the "Deluxe Care" line of baby shampoo, lotion, and
powder were Johnson & Johnson products. They've got the typeset, color scheme
and container shapes down to a T.

3. Problem Children There are products for sale at The 99¢ Store
that have recognizable brand names. But unless the item is small and cheap
to begin with, then something is going to be wrong with it if it is for
sale in this store. For example when I discovered a bin overflowing with
Arm & Hammer Tartar Control Dental Care toothpaste boxes, a grabbed a few,
thinking I was saving a bundle. When I got home and proudly showed my bargain
purchase to Carla, she pointed out that the toothpaste was "Importado
El Gel con Bicarbanato de Sodio." Yeah, so what, I thought, it is still
the real McCoy. Carla then discovered the real problem: "EXP5 96."
The stuff had been rotten for a couple of months. The boxes of toothpaste
probably sat in a warehouse in Mexico for three or four years, and when
they hit the expiration date, they were sold to The 99¢ Store and reshipped
to the US.

I also bought a bunch of Reach toothbrushes, since I wear them out really
quickly, and when I got home, I noticed a black sticker had been applied
to the back of every box. I was able to peel one of the stickers off enough
to see a little of what was printed on the box. Just a drawing of the brush
with arrows pointing to the brush's unique attributes, and a bar code. Why
did they have to cover that up?

I didn't think Jordache was still in business, but they are, and they're
licensing their trademark to the distributors of some of the foulest perfumes
and colognes my nose has ever had the misfortune of sniffing. I was only
able to work my way through three different fragrances -- "Wild Potion,"
"Wild Emotions," and "Fidelity" -- before calling it
quits. Somebody else with a stronger stomach will have to uncork "Cicero
Man," "Night Rhythm," and "Yacht Club," but please
make sure I'm not in the same room when it happens.

My favorite problem child product was the Coors baseball bat-shaped beer
bottle, a brown glass monstrosity that looked more like a caveman's club.
Also, as I recall from my beer drinking days, Coors is unpasteurized, so
it needs to be refrigerated or it'll spoil. The Coors clubs at The 99¢
Store were just stacked on an unrefrigerated shelf.

4. Party Crashers Here we have products with brand names that weren't
created to look like an established brand, but instead try to look like
they belong to a well-known line, only you haven't heard of them before.
Food products such as cookies, crackers, tea, are prime candidates for the
party crasher brands, sporting English royalty names, Scottish-plaid and
curly-cues on the box covers.

5. Nonames Finally, we descend to the murky bottom of The 99¢ Store
food chain, littered with product packages that don't try to be anything
other than containers for the substance they hold. This kind of packaging
was popular in the late '70s, during the "generic" product craze.
Those stark white boxes and cans with black all-uppercase block lettering
screamed from supermarket shelves: "My manufacturer wasted no money
on costly packaging design and is passing the savings on to you!" Of
course the cost of designing a logo becomes inconsequential when you spread
it across millions of units of a particular item, but the ploy worked anyway,
for a while at least. The generic brand fad is gone from supermarkets, who
have long since moved to packaging their cheap store-brand products in rich
brown-and-green colored "designer" packaging. Not so at The 99¢
Store, land of the 15-year time warp. I bought a 12-ounce pull-tab can of
noname-brand Luncheon Loaf, containing pork, chicken, salt, flavorings,
sugar, milk protein hydrolysate, water, sodium phosphate, and sodium nitrate.
There's no expiration date anywhere. As far as I know, this particular can
may have sat on a Safeway shelf in 1978, only to be shipped and stored in
a warehouse for 18 years, until popping up in The 99¢ Store. I'm not
about to open it and take a guess at the age by examining the contents.

I spent most of my time looking for oddball items. I was hoping to find
electrical appliances, but the only things I could find were Jesus nightlights
and various sports ball nightlights. What better way to illuminate your
bathroom than with the very symbols that illuminate the spirits of "church
& football Sunday" folks who shop here?

One of my favorite things was a greeting-card style rack of shrink wrapped
floppy disks. For ninety-nine cents, you can buy a word processor, spreadsheet,
database program, or dozens of other programs. Are you an executive who
wants to move up the corporate ladder? Then buy the "Managing People"
program, and learn how to "Get the most out of your employees and yourself
and become a better boss." Are you ill, and experiencing physical discomfort?
Don't go to a doctor, get a copy of "Non Medical Pain Relief."
Looking for a little action? Try "Dare to Dream," a program that
lets you "live out your wildest dreams." Not a bad deal for ninety-nine
cents!

I also wanted to find the single heaviest item for sale. The winner,
at 9.9¢ per pound: a 10-lb bag of kitty litter. The best perceived
value award goes to the "LeWorld" LCD watch, with "Quartz
Accuracy." The watch is made in the Darth Vader style, black and chunky
with useless bevels and protruding knobs. What appear to be four screws
around the perimeter of the watch are merely painted-on screw heads. Best
of all are the illustrations beneath the crystal indicating the three activities
for which the watch can be useful: soccer, leaning sideways, and sitting
on a bar. Also printed on the watch's face are the time differences between
major world cities, and a red fish. I like my 99¢ watch, and only have
two problems with it. One, the watch face says "WATER 100FT RESIST,"
but the package it came in says "This is not water resistant."
Two, the watch loses about 40 minutes a day.

Even though there were many things left to investigate -- clothing, kid's
furniture, 3-packs of off-brand beer -- I was starting to get my fill of
The 99¢ Store and needed to go. But before I left, I wanted to buy
one of the many different kinds of porcelain figures for sale. Clowns, squirrels,
barnyard animals -- so many to choose from! I finally settled on a cow laying
on its side. The cow is painted entirely black and gray, except for garish
pink udders, which poke out of the side of the cow in a way that makes me
think more of malignant growths than milk teats. I took my cow (which has
a "Made in Brazil" label printed in mirror-image type) and headed
for the checkout counter. The guy in front of me had one of the best mullets
I'd seen all day. He was buying 4 bottles of Coors beer baseball bats, and
a set of hacksaw blades. His friend, who was buying a walkman-style headphone
set that came with a vinyl carrying pouch, glanced into my basket and noticed
what I was getting: potted meat food product, rocketship drinking glasses,
a quartz watch, a bunch of toothbrushes, and a clay tumoral cow. Then he
looked up at me, smirked, and nudged his buddy, silently signaling him to
"check out the weirdo." Even the checkout girl gave me and my
purchase a second look. I thought "anything goes" would have been
the motto of The 99¢ Store. But that was silly of me to assume. I was
here for a different reason than the other customers. They were shopping
for things they really believed they needed and I was researching this article.
Still, our differences were only superficial. We were the same, deep down.
We were all fellow travelers at The 99¢ Store, pushing our squeaky
carts through blindingly-lit, linoleum-paved aisles, gawking at ridiculously
low-priced products shipped in from around the world, flabbergasted to be
somewhere where buying the experience of shopping costs next to nothing.

bOING bOING CLUB MEMBER UPDATE: The next issue of the bOING
bOING print zine will consist mainly of interviews. If you would like us
to interview somebody, or if you would like to interview someone, let us
know.

Last month we ran a real-life story about a fan's dream
date with Nina Hagen.

If you want to write for bOING bOING or bOING bOING digital,
let us know.